Brussels was foggy and cold, not much warmer than Helsinki at this time of the year. Luckily the tightly packed ULB campus provided plenty of interesting talks and lectures on open source projects in the form of FOSDEM 2009.

Maemo on BeagleBoard

I gave a speech in the Embedded track announcing a newly started project “Maemo on BeagleBoard“, whose idea is to run Maemo software on a BeagleBoard. The project is just taking its baby steps and requires a lot of work to grow up to something really useful.

The project infrastructure has been established and for the time being it just provides instructions how to set up your BeagleBoard to run Maemo stuff using the provided rootfilesystem and kernel image. The current release is based on the Maemo 5 pre-alpha2 SDK, which allows only a very spartan environment because of yet unpublished major Maemo 5 components.

I have high hopes that the upcoming alpha release of the Maemo 5 SDK will have more useful content available. Among other goodies, it will give us a first look at what the new Maemo UI will look like and if everything goes as planned you’ll be able to run the new UI on a BeagleBoard.

Why BeagleBoard?

BeagleBoard is a promising platform to run the new Maemo 5 software since it is built around an OMAP3 processor from Texas Instruments. Maemo 5 supports it too and all the software in the Maemo 5 repository is built with options suitable for OMAP3’s ARM Cortex-A8 core.

With all the fuss about BeagleBoard, you should keep in mind that in the end it is not an official target hardware for Maemo 5. It’s just something that’s low-cost, fun to hack with and processor-wise related to Maemo 5.

As mentioned, I’m putting high hopes on the Maemo 5 alpha SDK release to boost this project further. There’s a lot to improve on the web site and a good action plan is needed to see how to change the packages published in the SDK to better server the BeagleBoard environment.